An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series)

by Carver Greene

  “Race you, Mommy,” she giggled, and in one sweep, lifted her nightgown above her head and off her body. The gown sailed across the room and landed in a rocking chair, oddly obscuring the vision of a teddy bear.

  By seven that morning, Chase was pulling into her parking space in front of the Public Affairs Office. North, Cruise, and the others wouldn’t arrive for another fifteen or twenty minutes. She would have the time alone behind her office’s closed doors to talk with Shapiro about the meeting with his mystery source.

  Five minutes later, she’d started a pot of coffee and was listening for the telephone, adrenaline pushing through the leftover grogginess of sleep deprivation. This was it. Paul Shapiro would be calling any second, and she gave a silent prayer that whatever he had to tell her would totally clear Stone of any suspicion regarding infidelity with Melanie and involvement in a cover-up conspiracy regarding the 81.

  Ten minutes later, footsteps were charging up the staircase. Sergeant North called out a greeting and headed straight for the break room to pour himself a cup of coffee. Chase followed. “Anything yet?” she asked.

  North had a small bandage just under his jaw, a shaving cut, she guessed. He shook his head. “Couldn’t find anyone who knew how to reach the guy on a Sunday, so I’ll head over to his squadron in a few minutes.”

  Back in her office, she moved a few files around on her desk, unable to focus on anything but the impending ring of the telephone, which with North’s presence meant she would now have to let him answer and then wait for him to forward the call. He would most likely ask why Shapiro from the Honolulu Current was calling so early. She would have to think up a plausible reason.

  Another five minutes and still no call from Paul Shapiro. Cruise and the others were chatting their way up to the second story, following their noses to the coffee.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” they called in unison. The office was filling up with voices and chatter about who did what over the weekend. Football scores. Martinez had won the pool a second consecutive week. Laughter. Ribbing. The clink of spoons in coffee cups. Cruise hovered in Chase’s doorway and asked about the weekend. “Quiet,” Chase answered, and compelled to act normal, asked, “and yours?”

  This invited more than Chase honestly wanted to know. Her head, trying to stay clear enough for Shapiro’s news, was filling up with Cruise’s weekend recap about time with her son, and Chase thought, at one point, she might even scream at the woman to return to work. But she didn’t scream. She smiled and asked thoughtful questions at all the appropriate pauses before interrupting Cruise as a diversion to ask about the lineup for the upcoming edition of the Hawaii Marine.

  “I’ll get my notes,” Cruise said.

  “No,” Chase nearly shouted, and felt her face blush when Cruise appeared stunned. “I mean … let’s plan an editorial meeting a little later this morning.” Chase glanced at her desk calendar. At 1500, she and North were due at 464’s hangar for a run-through of the upcoming Marine Corps Ball ceremony. As the Public Affairs officer, Chase had the annual duty of reading the Commandant’s speech and the traditional anniversary address from famous Marine General Chesty Puller that was read at every anniversary ceremony throughout the Corps. Other than the practice, she was free most of the afternoon. She glanced at her watch and up at Cruise. “About eleven?”

  Sergeant Cruise nodded and excused herself. Chase exhaled, grateful to be alone again with her anticipation of Shapiro’s telephone call. The planning of the base newspaper would have to go on, despite what she might learn in the next few minutes, but she would worry about the newspaper when the time came. Stone had always called her the master of compartmentalization. She’d cringed, too, over the comment. Multi-tasking came with the job, but she had the sense he was complaining about how she compartmentalized him and Molly as well.

  Then it was eight, nine, and even ten o’clock with still no word from Shapiro. At ten-thirty, when she could stand it no more, Chase called the Honolulu Current and asked to be put through to his desk. His voice mail picked up. She left a brief message: “This is Captain Anderson, Public Affairs, Marine Corps Base, Hawaii. Please give me a call.” She waited another fifteen minutes before trying his cell phone. Again, she reached his voice mail. She left the same message. She called his home phone number, but hung up when his voice mail answered. By the time Cruise, Martinez, and North showed up in her doorway for the editorial meeting, Chase was bordering between anger and worry over why Shapiro hadn’t called.

  The editorial meeting lasted a little more than an hour during which Chase listened to her staff discussing the page assignments for various stories. One young reporter, a Pfc who had prepared a news feature about the upcoming deployment of 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment to Iraq, was to be given his first page-one byline. Another young reporter, who had been pleading for an opportunity to write about anything other than the Pet-of-the-Week feature, had completed a decent piece on the role of helicopter crew chiefs. Cruise suggested the piece be assigned to the first page of the feature section. Everyone agreed.

  Martinez chuckled. “Guess we’ll have to find someone else to cover Pet-of-the-Week from now on.” And Cruise passed around the Marine’s photographs that were to accompany the feature on the crew chiefs. The work had enormous appeal and was unlike anything else Chase had seen run in a military newspaper.

  “She’s not just capturing action,” Chase said, “or people in profile and uniforms so that we have to rely on the captions to even know who they are. We see too much of that. She’s captured their eyes.” Chase was still studying the photograph of three crew chiefs in flight suits and headgear, leaning with a certain swagger against the open doorway of a CH-46 Sea Knight. The Marine in the center of the photograph with the small moustache, reminded her of Stone’s crew chief, Mouse, who died during Stone’s first crash. Mouse had grown up in a small rural Virginia town not far from Chase’s hometown. In fact, his high school was the out-of-town rival to Chase’s.

  Both Mouse and Stone’s copilot Hammer had been a huge part of her family once. Two single guys who would show up on a Monday night before the football game with a package of hotdogs and buns and a plea to just hang-out with a real family in a real house. Chase always welcomed them. Molly adored both men who, like big brothers, showered her with attention and gifts. An outsider to military life probably couldn’t understand the bond they shared. Stone’s life had depended on the actions and reactions of two others, and their lives on his. Would a woman like Melanie Appleton have understood this? When the meeting concluded, Chase shuffled through the telephone messages, certain to find one from Shapiro. But there wasn’t one, and it was already after noon. Where was he? Why hadn’t he called? The only phone messages were from her insurance company and the body shop.

  She had the urge to drive over to the chapel where the meeting was to have taken place the night before. She couldn’t explain why. She looked out the large window at the busy tarmac with its taxiing helicopters and hustling mechanics. She hadn’t been able to run in several days, in fact, not since White’s helicopter crash. Her wreck and the whiplash had made it impossible for a few days. But, physically anyway, she was feeling better, more limber. She would run Perimeter Road toward the chapel, and once there … she didn’t know. Look for some sort of clue that Shapiro and his mystery Deep Throat had left behind?

  Ten minutes later she had changed into running clothes and gone in search of North. She found him in the pressroom, half standing, half sitting atop a desk with a notepad in his lap, jotting lunch requests like a short order cook. “I’ll take the number four,” Martinez said and passed the well-worn take-out menu to Cruise.

  Cruise was about to order when she noticed that her boss had entered. “Lunch, ma’am?” she asked.

  Chase’s stomach growled loud enough that she was compelled to comment. “See what you’ve done?” Chase stared at the menu, the myriad of choices—roast pork, duck, chicken, beef ribs, and on and on— everything was bec
oming one giant blur. Thanks to Paul Shapiro she couldn’t even concentrate on lunch. “You like number 4, Staff Sergeant Martinez?”

  Martinez was twirling an ink pen in his left hand. He stopped. “Yes, ma’am. Only thing I ever get.” Four was the island specialty: roast pork, rice, macaroni salad, and bread. She would never eat half of it, especially after a run, but she could take the rest home.

  She handed the menu back to Cruise and said to North, “Number 4.”

  He jotted her order onto the page. “Aye-aye, ma’am.”

  “I’m running Perimeter,” she said and walked out.

  Halfway down the stairs, she nearly turned back for her cell phone that she’d left in her top desk drawer, then reconsidered. She hated its annoying bounce against her waist, the way the rubbing against her skin caused an itch. Stone had been horrified one night when she was undressing for bed and he’d spotted long scratch marks on one side of her waist. She had turned and stared at her reflection in the mirror for several seconds before remembering how she’d been itching throughout that day’s run. Instinctively, she’d scratched at the itch throughout the entire run. “You look like you’ve tangled with a wild cat,” he’d said.

  No, she would leave the cell phone behind. To Hell with Paul Shapiro. He’d had all morning to call her. Besides, it was Perimeter Road … where the best and worst part of running along a road with such breathtaking views of mountains, the Pacific, and helicopters overhead was that anyone could find her.

  She sprinted down the staircase and out the door toward Perimeter. She was surprised how free she suddenly felt. She could imagine as she rounded first one curve that put her office building out of sight and then another curve that provided an unencumbered view of a swelling Pacific that, if she were to continue running, she might run out of her problems the way some people ran out of their shoes. A marathon racer from Kenya, for example. Less than a mile into the race, he’d literally run out of his shoes and never looked back, so the story goes, never caring for anything but the power of the race, of the earth beneath his feet, and so he had run and run on, until he passed runner after runner, until he’d taken the lead. And he won, though officials had disqualified him as the winner. That is, until the declared winner renounced his victory, and declared the man from Kenya—the great racer without shoes—the true victor.

  And so Chase ran and ran. She knew she would never outrun her grief over losing Stone or over the disappointment now in his possible infidelity anymore than she was likely to run out of her perfectly fitted expensive Nikes. She needed this run to talk to Stone, and so she did. She asked him why he hadn’t told her about his meetings with a therapist. What had there been to hide? What had he suspected or known about the 81 that he hadn’t shared with her? How had he managed to climb back into that cockpit after the first crash in Afghanistan? Could he help her to understand all this? Had he forgiven her for the affair with General Armstrong? Eventually the head noise was replaced with a concentration on nothing but the present moment—the beating of her heart, the way her lungs were filling with air and releasing. By mile three, she found her rhythm … two short breaths that began on the uptake of her left foot, and the long exhale that happened when her left foot again made contact with the ground. In-in, out. In- in, out.

  Not until Officer Candidate School had Chase discovered a love for running. All through high school she’d played soccer and hated the laps they’d been forced to run around the track. Even then, she was one of the faster runners, and the girls’ track coach had called her aside one afternoon after practice and asked if she would consider going out for cross-country. She couldn’t think of anything she was less interested in than long-distance running. At least soccer provided a break from monotony. A partial soccer scholarship had helped to pay her way through the first two years of college and relieved the financial burden for her parents. Midway into her junior year, an ankle sprain left her on the sidelines, and by her third year, she was done with soccer altogether, though this had caused a bit of friction between Chase and her parents, who, with Chase’s brother about to enter college, had become too comfortable with the financial ease provided by Chase’s scholarship. And so twenty-year-old Chase, dressed in soccer shorts, a T-shirt, flip-flops, her hair in a ponytail, seized upon a moment of martyrdom that she would never regret—well not until the day she boarded the C-130 for Iraq, leaving Molly behind with her parents—and marched into the ROTC office on campus and signed up. She would show them she could take care of herself. The next weekend during dinner Chase confessed her deed and watched her mother burst into tears. Her father’s eyes had grown moist, and the look on her brother’s face had been somewhat readable between shock and guilt for not doing what a son, rather than a daughter, should have been willing to do, but couldn’t. Chase’s mother had returned with a box of tissues. Chase grabbed one and laughed, surprised at how hard everyone was taking it, reminding them, “I’ll be fine. It’s peacetime, remember?”

  Only peace hadn’t lasted. For that matter, when had it ever? A year and a half later, after managing to talk her way into a deferment from OCS, she was in grad school when the World Trade Center towers fell to terrorism. For a week, she’d walked around the UVA campus in shock, as did her professors and fellow students. A week after that, she felt compelled to do something, anything, that might make a difference. And that was when she’d walked out of grad school and into a recruiter’s office, tearing up her deferment papers before the young sergeant’s desk.

  At Quantico, she’d learned how to field strip a machine gun and how to fire it. She was one of twenty women and ninety men who ran the hills of Northern Virginia, and tackled the obstacle courses. She learned how to fire a pistol and a rifle and how to climb under concertina wire amid smoke grenades and exploding bunkers, how to read a map and to navigate her way through wilderness with nothing but a compass and the moon and stars above her. And after Quantico, she’d been sent to Ft. Meade in Northern Virginia to the Defense Information School where she was schooled on all the rhetoric necessary for becoming a Public Affairs officer. Then she was shipped to Okinawa where she’d met Stone.

  Overhead, an 81 roared by, heading out toward the Pacific. If Stone were alive, he might be flying in that one, she thought.

  The traffic was a bit heavy during lunchtime and as cars approached, she left the surety of pavement for the grass. She could make out the faces of Marines as they headed toward the gate for a respite from their work lives on a Marine Corps base. Sometimes you just wanted to drive off the base during lunch to remind yourself there was a whole world beyond a military vortex of customs, courtesies, and regulations. Sometimes you just wanted to walk through a parking lot without having to salute someone.

  She had run a little more than four miles when headlights of an oncoming car flashed several times. She glanced over her right shoulder for whomever the flashing lights had been intended, but there was no one. The headlights flashed again and the car slowed. Cautious, Chase again left the pavement for the grass, taking care not to turn her ankle.

  A horn blast startled her into looking up. The BMW was rolling to a stop. Colonel Figueredo looked grim behind his aviator sunglasses. “Get in,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Captain Anderson,” he said, leaning across the seat and opening the door for her, “please get in.”

  Chase felt her knees go weak. Her whole body began to quiver with fear. Her palm, sweaty, slipped from the door handle. She slid into the car and braced herself for the worst. “Is it Molly?”

  “Your daughter’s fine, as far as I know,” he said, and added, “Buckle up.” He whipped the BMW into a u-turn.

  “Where are you taking me?” She wondered if he’d learned about her Saturday night meeting with Paul Shapiro in Nanakuli.

  “I’m not sure yet.” His seriousness was unnerving.

  “Kidnapping is a federal offense, you know … sir.” When he didn’t answer, just continued driving past the socce
r fields and the commissary, she added, “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I called your cell phone, and when you didn’t answer, I called your office. Sergeant North said you were out running. You’re hard to miss on Perimeter Road.” He glanced over and forced a half-smile.

  A minute or so later, he was veering the car into the empty parking lot at the chapel. Chase had to catch herself from gasping at the irony. It was as if he’d been reading her mind while she was running Perimeter Road and knew this was where she’d eventually end up. The chapel looked abandoned, forlorn in the empty lot. He drove past the chapel toward the Pacific side of the lot and parked near the banyan tree.

  He turned off the ignition. Chase swiveled in her seat so that her back was against the door. In profile, Figueredo, with his dark, brooding good looks and chiseled jaw, seemed like a subject for Picasso. She could make out one eye, one nostril, one corner of his mouth. She could almost believe there was only this side of him, that somewhere along the way, the other half of him had been severed and discarded. But where? The war? Was the other half of him still somewhere in that God-forsaken desert with the tribes of Afghanistan?

  He opened his mouth and closed it. He seemed uncertain about where to start, and Chase was about to press him, when he blurted, “You’re wanted for questioning at Military Police headquarters.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “A detective from the Honolulu Police wants to question you about … Dr. Melanie Appleton.”

  Chase’s mind filled with rage. So Paul Shapiro had deceived her after all. He’d promised to call at seven-fifteen that morning to fill her in on his meeting with his mystery source and to give her adequate time to prepare Molly for what she might hear about her father. Instead, Shapiro had gone back on his word and had reported what he’d learned to HP. Would everything she’d said the other night, her reaction as a wife when he’d told her about his sister’s affair, appear on the front page of the Current in the morning?